


Migrations

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Background Ensemble Cast (Gogo and Umaro and Mog being most prominent), Father Figures, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22311814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: Having lived in Figaro for a year after the fall of Kefka's tower, Gau is glad to travel east to reunite with friends. His isn't the only reunion he's interested in, however.
Relationships: Cayenne Garamonde | Cyan Garamonde/Macías "Mash" Rene Figaro | Sabin Rene Figaro
Comments: 14
Kudos: 24
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Migrations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neosaiyanangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neosaiyanangel/gifts).



Edgar had shown Gau a vast device made of gears, golden circles and polished rocks, which he said would tell them where the stars were and what the time was. Gau was polite. He did not ask why it was under the earth and not beneath the sky. He did not ask why Edgar cared for time in a land where the season was always the dry one. He dutifully repeated the name--oh-raw-ree, ah-rah-ray, orr-er-y--until the matrons charged with teaching him enunciation were satisfied and allowed him to bound up the long spiraling staircases and back towards the kitchens. The cook, keeping to an earlier agreement, let him abscond with one of the squabs designated for the evening’s meal a bit early, although Gau was told he had to accept it cooked.

When Sabin caught up with him, the bird was half skeletonized, and Gau scrambled to find a bit of cloth with which to dab his face, hoping he might avoid being dragged off to the matrons charged with teaching him etiquette or to the matrons charged with keeping him washed. Sabin, much to his relief, made no indication he would be consigned to either fate. Instead, he sat down next to him, flopping against the soft blue tapestries that lined the hall, and asked if he could have the remaining drumstick.

“So did Edgar tell you what day’s coming up?” he asked after a while.

Gau cocked his head. Edgar probably had. He wanted Sabin to explain, however. Sabin had a much better head for explanations.

“Well, it’s going to be a year since we saved the world soon, you know?”

Gau nodded, tallying all the numbers that went into a year as he thought back to the orrery’s circles and gears: three-hundred days (more or less), four seasons in Tzen, one season in Figaro, two seasons back on the Veldt.

“So yeah, everyone’s getting together in Mobliz soon.” Sabin smiled. “It’ll be a big party--a commemoration of sorts.”

“Everyone?”

“Well... everyone’s _invited_.” He scratched the back of his head, fidgeting a moment with the tie to his ponytail. “You game?”

Gau grinned, letting a stray fragment of squab fall to the floor.

“Everyone invited...” he chirped. “Everyone... from Doma?”

Sabin let out something that began like a laugh, but he stopped short of completing it. 

“Yeah… yeah.” He was grinning too. “I’m hoping he’ll show.”

Gau leapt upright, forgetting himself for a moment as he wheeled his arms like a feinting partridge or a bowerbird on display.

“Gau going!” he laughed. “ _We_ going to see Cyan!”

Sabin gingerly picked up the near to clean bones they’d flung onto the floor as Gau took a charge down the hall. If it had been that long, Gau thought, if it had been three-hundred days, it would be the wet season out on the vast plains where he had been a child, when those beasts and birds that had moved out in search of water marched back home.

* * *

There had been some debate as to how presentable they were going to try to make him, and Gau had grudgingly consented to at least don a shirt before they embarked for Nikeah. On the long ride south, however, it managed to go missing. Edgar only asked after it once, and dropped the matter just as Sabin began to remove his shirt in solidarity. By the time they reached Mobliz, Gau looked every bit the ragged, sunburnt monstrosity the rest of the assembly remembered so fondly--save that he was a bit taller and bore the marks of a youth now used to having some matron or another trim his nails and brush out his hair.

He fell to a four-limbed sprint as the little village came into view and quite nearly collided with a mass of cloaks and scarves that--upon seeing him--had knelt down and sprinted on the four of its limbs as well.

“Gogo!” he shouted, pulling himself suddenly upright and extending a hand in greeting. “Good to see! Who here?”

The mimic extended its hand but did not take Gau’s. Instead, it proceeded to puff itself into the shape of a lumbering sasquatch, shrink back down and curl the cavorting form of a small dancing mammal, and then raise its arms aloft as though it were some beast woman about to cut through the skies over Zozo. Gau clapped, evidently pleased with the performance.

“Who else!?”

Sabin and Edgar lumbered down the hill as Gogo sang five bars of an opera, painted an amusing caricature of its person, and began to chastise itself for the disrespectful likeness it had produced. By the time the two princes closed the distance, several other members of their former company had at last appeared, accompanied by a gaggle of shouting children. Terra, loose hair fluttering in the wind, giggled as Strago began to fume at the portrait of his own fuming.

So they all met, and there were embraces and salutations and shouts, and Gau smiled patiently as everybody told him how much he had grown up as though growing had been something one had to learn. He noticed, of course, who was yet absent, and even in the thick of everyone’s excitement, he found himself looking about at the sky and the shore, as though watching might bring some ship from either over to where he stood.

Edgar soon made himself the center of everyone’s conversations he could, and Gau flopped unceremoniously onto the trampled grass, staining what little clothing was still unstained with a few streaks of brilliant green. A great black dog, now very old, sauntered over to flop alongside him, evidently having mellowed over the course of however many days dogs reckon in their year.

He looked over to where Sabin stood, a little ways apart from his brother and from everyone else. He did not look back, however, his own eyes being fixed on the same horizon to which Gau had set his sights.

* * *

Nothing appeared then. Gau and Edgar and Sabin and everyone else eventually filed into a new built house, which lay half submerged in the earth at if the building itself were in need of shelter. Within it, they found both a great abundance of food and a great abundance of children attempting to displace it. Sabin, who had helpfully agreed to assist Terra ferry her charges back inside, dropped an additional three toddlers tucked under his arms, dislodged the one clinging about his neck, and then joined them in swarming the buffet.

Gau ate and observed, perching on a chair almost exactly as he had been trained to do as he watched the swarm of celebrants meet, divide, and mill as if they were so many beasts caught in the armistice of a watering hole. People together were different than people apart--both more guarded and more open. Gau was content to just look at their transformations for a span, chewing on the edge of some jerky Terra had set aside for him. Everyone assumed it was a food he particularly liked. 

Everyone was probably right.

He quite nearly choked on it, however, when the door swung suddenly open, and forgetting months of conditioning at the hands of many a matron, he grabbed for a cocktail Umaro was holding in the hopes of dislodging the offending morsel. The stem of the yeti’s martini glass snapped like a plucked flower, and the great beast looked on in baffled confusion as Gau downed the drink. Mog, who had just spent several minutes explaining the virtues of alcohol to his compatriot as he’d mixed that cocktail, said nothing, but the bobble-bearing antenna atop his head stiffened in obvious frustration as Setzer marched triumphantly into the room. 

Locke sauntered in not far behind, followed by a figure that stood a moment illumined in the door frame, as if hesitant to join the party. In the midst of a new wave of pandemonium and in the wake of some mogglish beverage of unknown composition, it took Gau a few seconds to register who it was.

“Cyan!”

It was not Gau that shouted the man’s name. He moved, however, as if it were, upsetting a footstool, overturning a small tray of kebabs, and half crushing a twelve-year-old’s hat in the process. He reached Cyan only a little before Sabin, and caught him in a wild, cackling embrace, clinging fast to his normally stiff-postured form as though it were a rock face. 

“Sir Gau!” Cyan gave a shout that turned into a smile, taking a step back as he was grappled. 

Sabin, who had taken a more circuitous route, arrived in short order to fold the meeting into a group hug, and the three of them laughed like hyenas to at last be reunited. (In Cyan’s case, admittedly, like a very reticent and polite hyena.) While Setzer made some sort of bombastic pronouncement and Relm fumed over her hat, it seemed to Gau as though the world had collapsed back to the time before it was broken. He was, at that instant, quite near oblivious to the roar and crash of life outside of the three of them save for the fact that it existed and that it too was good.

When he finally let go of Cyan, who had not yet had much chance to speak, he could see Sabin seemingly at a loss as to what to say. 

Perhaps it was the fermented something or another he’d just drunk? Perhaps it was that he knew nobody ever thought ill of him for anything he said? Whatever the case, Gau decided to fill that silence with his exact thoughts upon it.

“Stay this time! Stay!” He shouted. “Both fathers together!” 

He beamed as he roughly shoved the two men’s hands into one another’s, and watched both turn redder than men caught in the fever of any grasswym or grillon’s bite. 

* * *

Others took notice. Others said things in good humor. Others dropped the matter when asked to and found plentiful things with which to distract themselves. Gau scrambled into some precarious and contorted posture atop a high windowsill and watched as Celes slowly ate a cut of fish in meditative silence; as Relm dangled fistfuls of Jidoorish miniatures for Setzer to effusively praise; as Locke sauntered quietly over to where Terra stood and slipped a ring into her hand, mentioning that there were treasures and mementos a man still might find after the tower fell. Gau felt very warm. As he rested in the dappled sunlight, amidst the shadows of new grown leaves, he thought of many seasons past, coiled up snug against the soft coats of mu and stray cats.

The effects of the drink had left him and twilight had settled over the town by the time Gau finally stopped dozing, and he noticed that the children had been successfully herded to some other locale. Some member of the party still stalked the remains of the feast. The bulk of the group, however, seemed to have left for another room of the house, from whence he thought he could just make out Edgar or Locke or Strago or whomever it was this time was telling some highly improbable and gloriously self-aggrandizing story.

He started, growing to full and sudden sobriety and wakefulness as he realized that the lone straggler was Cyan. The dark countenanced knight spoke to himself. 

“I mean, I did take the boy’s suggestion as a jest at first, but…” He gestured, paced, mouthed words he didn’t give voice to.

“It’s time to move forward… to embrace the beauty of life...” 

He laughed very quietly. “I wrote that once, you know?”

Gau considered saying nothing and continuing to lie there unmoving. He considered somersaulting down and making an impassioned plea that Cyan return with them to Figaro. He listened some minutes more, deliberating.

“The truth is…”

Cyan slumped and stopped short as Gau remembered the hazy outlines of forms and figures that stalked scentless and with silent footfalls through Doma castle. He recalled other words spoken before another child. 

_I... love thee. I love thee more than anything..._

He decided. He took a breath and flopped from where he lay, gracefully rolling just out of the path of a tepid bowl of punch and onto the floor. Somewhere else, a roar of laughter covered both the tramp of his descent and the yelp of Cyan’s surprise.

“Sir Gau! Didst thou…” 

Gau nodded, putting a finger to his lips.

“No worry. No tell Sabin.”

Cyan looked increasingly flustered.

“ _You_ tell Sabin.” Gau nodded decisively. “Tell Sabin and come back to Figaro.”

“Gau…” Cyan knelt to where meet his gaze while he sat on the floor. “Thou must know that we are all only just meeting again. I have… I am not… I think thou dost not understand…”

Gau shrugged.

“Four whole seasons in Doma since we saw you. _Thou_ no understand.”

“What dost thou mean?”

Gau thought of the birds that left one another for southern isles when it was dry, of the learthen winged lopros that sailed off from the mountains for eight seasons or more when their mates died. How could he explain? How could he describe the simple imperative every other thing that lived had to return to where it belonged when the time demanded it?

“You say yourself…” he began haltingly. “You say ‘move forward.’”

Cyan put a hand on his shoulder.

“Sir Gau, people doth say many things when alone…”

Gau shook his head. “Cyan not lie… not even when alone.” He stood suddenly and puffed out his chest, striking an exaggerated pose. “Not honorable.”

Cyan laughed, but it was a sad laugh. Somewhere else there came snatches of a song or an argument or some other ruckus. He breathed very deeply as he looked towards the door.

“Thou knowest, Sir Gau,” he began wearily. “Thou knowest I am not really thy fath--”

“Gau know!” Gau said very firmly, cutting him off.

He felt his hands ball into fists. His face was suddenly hot.

“ _I..._ know.”

The emphasis imbued by the correct pronoun was evidently not lost on Cyan, and he reached after Gau with a look of decided concern as he suddenly bounded from out room. Gau was glad that he was too slow or too hesitant to catch him, as somehow--over the course however long a year was--he had grown loathe that anyone should see him weep.

It made him feel all the worse that Sabin, walking down the long length of the hall, should catch sight of him as he dashed out towards the hills over Mobliz. He finally found it in him to breathe again when he was in some pleasant wilderness and the light from out the house’s windows seemed but larger stars set against the glittering night sky.

* * *

Gau would have taken some pride, perhaps, in skulking back towards the vale of Mobliz only when day broke and when the others were in some decided panic about his whereabouts. He was not, however, as stubborn or stalwart as he might hope when it came to making others worry. The moon had sunk at least a hand-breadth towards the horizon, however, by the time he shuffled back towards the large house that had held all the prior day’s festivities. Somewhere, he heard the whirr of a nightjar calling.

When he approached the other side of the window in which he’d spent the afternoon napping, he realized anew the great difference between where it was positioned in relation to the ground outside and where it was positioned in relation to the floor within. The odd construction of the house meant that he might sit in the grass and look down at those within it, much as he’d looked down upon them in the thick of the celebration. He supposed, given Sabin’s trajectory in the hall, that it was not that surprising to see him and Cyan, alone and apparently engaged in some very serious conversation.

The two men stood, facing one another, hands joined although there was no Gau there to put them together. He imagined they must have been speaking since the time he had left, and this was heartening to him. Were he pressed, however, he would admit to the slightest bit of disappointment that neither had been concerned to the extent that they thought to go looking for him.

With his face and ear pressed close to the glass, he could just make out what was being said. Three-hundred or so days of matrons showing him how to correctly mouth each phoneme had left him with skills beyond proper pronunciation, and before that, the Veldt had always rewarded good listeners with long lives. 

“It really stupid, you know?” he saw and heard Sabin say. “If they put this in a play or something, I’m sure it’d get dismissed as derivative.”

“Thou canst ask Setzer on that count. Formula is held in high regard in some theatrical traditions. In Doma, for example…”

Cyan smiled sadly, looking towards the ground as he drifted off. Sabin, cupping his chin with one hand, lifted his face so that their gazes once more met.

“You can tell me about Doma if you want, Cyan.”

Sabin’s voice was warm. Cyan’s smile turned from bitter to bittersweet.

“I will, thou knowst.” 

“I look forward to it.”

As they embraced, Gau felt as though his whole person would contort into a full-bodied grin, but he did his utmost to remain as still--as a lizard or rhobite might under a predator’s gaze.

“I canst not vow that all will run smooth,” Cyan said after a moment, pulling back a little.

“I wouldn’t ask,” Sabin blithely replied.

“I must proclaim that this all more sudden than I was ready for...”

“There was a year before.” He shrugged. “Plenty of years to figure the rest out.”

“I must…”

“We’ve been over this all for how long?”

Gau realized that he should not tarry long, lest he introduce the doubtlessly derivative narrative turn that would be his own discovery. 

He watched, however, as both men swayed a moment in one another’s arms, his own eyes bright as Sabin craned his head to deliver that gesture that seemed a unique foible of man--mouth upon mouth--a bite that was kind.

* * *

Dawn finally came, and the days after it passed, and it came time at last to return to Figaro. 

Gau, when the hour finally arrived, did not pretend to act any more or less jubilant than he truly was at the news Cyan was to return with them. He laughed, clapped, capered and howled with all the wild unrestraint expected of him, and he meant every outlandish whoop and cry he made in celebration. 

Later, when they were on the long ride back up the coast, Cyan stopped him as they made camp one evening, apologizing succinctly but with a very heartfelt firmness for having upset him on the first night of the party. “Father” and “son” did not number among the words they exchanged, but Gau was content to leave a silence there. 

It was, oddly enough, Edgar who brought up the topic of fathers. He spoke to Gau a few days later, a little ways apart from the two men newly united as all four of them awaited the ferry.

“Are you quite happy, Gau?” he asked, looking off towards where the blue of the channel met the blue of the sky. 

“Gau happy.”

“I’m happy too.” He smiled. “Happy that he’s happy. Happy Cyan’s happy. Happy in general.” 

He paused and watched as Sabin, leaning slightly against Cyan’s shoulder, stopped to point out to him a bright bird flying low as its wings grazed the foam of the shore. 

“How well do you think you’ll manage with all this paternal authority now that you’ve contrived to get yourself two fathers?”

Gau looked at him, eyes narrowing a bit at the word ‘contrived.’

“Gau _happy_ ,” he said again with a plain and honest emphasis.

Edgar smirked. “Gau is many things,” he said with a playful condescension. “Gau is smarter, perhaps, than one father has it in him to sort out.”

They looked at one another a moment, and Edgar turned away, hair flapping in the breeze. He said no more on it.

As they sailed through the salt air and back towards home, Gau thought through his words, mind scrambling and jumping a course around all the fathers he had had: the poor madman who had left him on the plain; the aloof mate of the purple-skinned behemoth that had licked and nursed him throughout a rowdy toddlerhood; the endless myriad of fish, beast, and fowl that had seen him survive, season after season, year after year, on the other side of the world.

As he ducked between Sabin and Cyan’s arms, looking to where the sun hung low in the sky, he thought that two fathers was, all things considered, a much more manageable number.

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.
> 
> Much thanks for my unnamed and long suffering IRL beta.


End file.
